So, you're looking for a New Relic alternative. You're probably tired of the billing surprises, the proprietary agents, or maybe you just want more control over your data. You're not alone. Many SREs, DevOps engineers, and application developers are feeling the pinch of complex pricing models and the limitations of closed ecosystems. You need visibility, but you shouldn't have to mortgage the farm for it.
In this article, we'll break down the real trade-offs and show you how these platforms stack up, focusing on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), support for open standards, full-stack capabilities, ease of use, and AI-powered insights. Let's get to it.
1. Dash0
Dash0 is an OpenTelemetry-native observability platform built for cloud-native startups and mid-sized companies. It's designed to give you powerful, affordable, and future-proof observability without vendor lock-in.
Dash0 is fundamentally built around OpenTelemetry, supporting all signals (logs, metrics, traces) and their relationships right out of the box. It uses a resource-centric approach to tie everything together, so you can see all telemetry for a specific service or pod in one unified view.
The platform uses standard OpenTelemetry terminology, making it easy for anyone familiar with the spec to jump right in. Plus, it leverages OpenTelemetry's semantic conventions for powerful filtering and automated analysis.
What's good
- OpenTelemetry-Native by Design: This isn't just "OTel compatible"; Dash0 is built from the ground up on OpenTelemetry's data model and architecture. That means no data mapping to proprietary models, no lost context, and full support for trace contexts in logs and exemplars in metrics. You get full signal integration with consistent terminology.
- Transparent and Predictable Pricing: Dash0 charges by the number of logs, spans, and metric data points ingested, not by data volume (GB) or user count. This model is designed to prevent bill shock and lets you send rich metadata without fear of ballooning costs. It even provides real-time cost visibility dashboards, broken down by service or team.
- Zero Lock-In Philosophy: Dash0 commits to open standards. It uses OTLP for data, PromQL for all signals (yes, even logs and traces!), and Perses for dashboards, which means you can take your data, queries, and dashboards with you if you ever decide to switch.
- Intelligent Observability with SIFT Framework: Dash0’s SIFT framework focuses on practical AI. It offers Spam removal for noisy data, Log AI for automatic log level detection in unstructured logs with high accuracy and zero false positives, intelligent Filtering and grouping of telemetry, and Triage for one-click, automated root cause analysis. This isn't just AI hype; it's about making your life easier.
The catch
Honestly, as a newer player, Dash0 doesn't have the decades-long market presence or as vast a library of niche integrations as some of the older, more established giants. While it's growing fast, some extremely specialized enterprise use cases might still lean on a broader, more mature ecosystem. If you're running a legacy stack with very specific, non-OpenTelemetry proprietary agents, the initial shift might require some refactoring, though the long-term benefits of OTel-native architecture make it worthwhile.
The verdict
Dash0 is a solid choice for cloud-native startups and mid-sized companies already using or planning to adopt OpenTelemetry and Prometheus. If you're fed up with unpredictable bills, vendor lock-in, and proprietary black boxes, Dash0 delivers a modern, cost-effective, and truly open alternative. It's built by engineers, for engineers, with a focus on practical features that get you answers fast, without unnecessary complexity or hidden costs.
Ready to see observability without boundaries? Experience the difference an OpenTelemetry-native platform makes. Get instant visibility into your logs, metrics, and traces, control your costs, and eliminate vendor lock-in. Start your free 14-day trial of Dash0 today!
2. Datadog
Datadog is a dominant, publicly traded, all-in-one SaaS platform that provides extensive monitoring, observability, and security capabilities across your entire tech stack. It's known for its broad feature set, deep integrations, and unified UI. If you need to monitor everything under the sun and have a significant budget, Datadog often comes to mind.
What's good
- Comprehensive Feature Set: Datadog truly offers an "everything-in-one-place" experience, covering infrastructure, APM, log management, RUM, synthetic monitoring, and a growing suite of security products. It reduces tool sprawl significantly.
- Extensive Integrations: With over 350 vendor-supported integrations, Datadog can pull metrics and events from almost any DevOps tool or cloud service, including deep native support for major cloud providers like AWS.
- Polished User Experience: Despite its vastness, Datadog's UI is generally well-regarded for its polish and powerful dashboarding capabilities. Many users find initial setup for key features relatively simple.
The catch
The catch is clear: cost and vendor lock-in. Datadog's multi-vector pricing model is notoriously complex and leads to "bill shock" for many. You're paying for per-host, per-GB for log ingest, then again for log indexing, and OpenTelemetry metrics get treated as expensive "custom metrics" at $5.00 per 100 over a small allotment. This financially punishes OpenTelemetry adoption. Their high-water mark billing means a temporary scaling event can inflate your entire month's bill. The platform is fundamentally built around its proprietary agent, making migration a significant, costly undertaking. While powerful, the UI can be overwhelming for new users.
The verdict
Datadog is ideal for large enterprises with diverse, often legacy, environments and a substantial budget who prioritize a single vendor for nearly all their monitoring needs. If you're already deeply entrenched in their ecosystem and have the budget (and a dedicated team to manage the billing complexities), it works. However, for cost-conscious, cloud-native teams heavily invested in OpenTelemetry, Datadog is a less-than-ideal New Relic alternative due to its high cost, OTel tax, and inherent vendor lock-in.
3. Dynatrace
Dynatrace is another all-in-one observability and security platform, but it differentiates itself with a heavy focus on AI-powered automation. Its core is the "Davis" AI engine, designed to automatically identify and analyze the root cause of performance issues across complex, dynamic cloud-native environments.
What's good
- AI-Powered Root Cause Analysis: Dynatrace's "Davis" AI is its crown jewel. It automatically discovers dependencies, detects anomalies, and pinpoints root causes, aiming to significantly reduce MTTR without extensive manual configuration. This "answers, not data" approach is a major draw for enterprises.
- Automated Deployment and Instrumentation: The "OneAgent" technology offers zero-touch, automatic discovery and instrumentation of your entire application and infrastructure stack once installed. This dramatically cuts down on manual setup and maintenance.
- Deep Full-Stack Context: Its proprietary "PurePath" tracing provides method-level visibility, correlated with infrastructure metrics and user experience data, giving you a complete, causally-linked picture of transactions.
The catch
Dynatrace comes with a premium price tag, making it inaccessible for smaller organizations or those with constrained budgets. While powerful, many users on practitioner forums find the platform's UI complex, confusing to navigate, and the overall product can feel "disjointed." Documentation is also a frequent complaint, described as unstructured and lacking conceptual explanations. Support quality can also be inconsistent.
The verdict
Dynatrace is a strong contender for large enterprises with complex, dynamic, hybrid-cloud environments that are willing to pay top dollar for extensive automation and AI-driven insights. If your priority is a hands-off, AI-first approach to observability that minimizes manual troubleshooting, and you have the budget to match, it's a valid choice. For cloud-native teams seeking more control, simpler pricing, or a less opaque "black box" approach, it's not the best New Relic alternative.
4. Splunk Observability Cloud
Splunk Observability Cloud, formerly SignalFx, is Splunk's comprehensive SaaS offering for APM, infrastructure monitoring, RUM, and synthetic monitoring. It's built to be OpenTelemetry-native, providing a modern observability solution that integrates with Splunk's traditional log management strengths.
What's good
- OpenTelemetry-Native & Full-Fidelity Tracing: Splunk Observability Cloud embraces OpenTelemetry as its primary ingestion method. Its "NoSample™" tracing promises to capture 100% of trace data, eliminating blind spots often caused by sampling.
- Powerful Log Analysis Integration: For organizations already using Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud, Log Observer Connect provides a seamless bridge between metrics and traces in Observability Cloud and the deep search capabilities of the core Splunk platform.
- Scalability and Reliability: Splunk's core strength has always been handling massive data volumes, and this extends to its Observability Cloud, making it a reliable choice for large-scale environments.
The catch
Splunk is notoriously expensive. The Observability Cloud continues this trend, with costs that are often prohibitive for all but the largest enterprises. The separation of the log data store from metrics and traces means logs still reside in a different backend (the core Splunk platform), potentially introducing complexity and latency compared to truly unified platforms. While OTel-native, the overall cost of a full Splunk observability stack (including the core platform for logs) is a significant barrier.
The verdict
Splunk Observability Cloud is primarily a strong New Relic alternative for large enterprises already deeply invested in the broader Splunk ecosystem for log management and SIEM. If you're looking to unify APM and infrastructure monitoring within your existing Splunk investment, it offers modern, OTel-native capabilities. However, for green-field projects or organizations without a pre-existing Splunk commitment, its high cost and fragmented log storage make it a less competitive option.
5. Elastic Observability
Elastic Observability is built on the widely adopted open-source ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana). It provides a unified platform for logs, metrics, APM, RUM, and synthetic monitoring, leveraging Elasticsearch's powerful search and analytics engine for all telemetry data. It's available as a managed cloud service or self-hosted.
What's good
- Exceptional Log Search and Analytics: Powered by Elasticsearch, Elastic Observability excels at fast, flexible search, indexing, and analysis of massive log volumes.
- Open-Source Foundation: Its open-source roots provide a low-friction entry point, allowing teams to start for free with the ELK stack and scale to enterprise features or a managed cloud service. This provides significant flexibility and avoids initial vendor lock-in.
- Unified UI for All Signals: It consolidates logs, metrics, and traces into a single Kibana interface, offering a cohesive workflow for troubleshooting. You can seamlessly pivot between different telemetry types.
The catch
Self-hosting Elastic Observability comes with a significant operational burden; optimizing and scaling an Elasticsearch cluster requires deep expertise. While the managed Elastic Cloud removes this, its pricing can be confusing and lead to unexpected "bill shock," particularly with newer serverless offerings. The query language (KQL) has a learning curve for newcomers. Its APM solution, while improving, is generally considered less mature and automated than some dedicated APM tools.
The verdict
Elastic Observability is an excellent New Relic alternative for engineering teams with a strong need for powerful log search and analytics and a preference for open-source tooling. If you have the in-house expertise to manage a complex distributed system or are willing to navigate the complexities of their cloud pricing for managed convenience, it offers a robust solution. It's often seen as a more cost-effective alternative to Splunk for log management.
6. Honeycomb
Overview
Honeycomb is a SaaS-only observability platform built specifically for analyzing high-cardinality, high-dimensionality data from complex distributed microservices. It's OpenTelemetry-native and focuses on helping developers debug "unknown unknown" problems in production with speed and precision.
What's good
- High-Cardinality Data Analysis: Honeycomb is architected to handle "infinite cardinality" data. This means you can instrument your code with rich, arbitrary context (like customer_id or feature_flag_id) without fear of performance degradation or spiraling costs. It's a game-changer for debugging complex, novel issues.
- BubbleUp for Automated Anomaly Detection: This standout feature automatically compares outliers to a baseline, instantly highlighting the specific attributes that differ, quickly narrowing down potential root causes.
- OpenTelemetry-Native & Developer-Centric: Honeycomb is a strong proponent of OpenTelemetry, providing excellent tooling and documentation for OTel instrumentation. Its visual query builder is designed for fast, intuitive exploration of event data, making it very developer-friendly.
- Predictable, Event-Based Pricing: Pricing is simple and based solely on the volume of events ingested, with no charges for users, cardinality, or custom metrics. This transparency encourages deep instrumentation.
The catch
Honeycomb is hyper-focused on event and trace-based debugging. It's not a traditional, all-encompassing monitoring tool for infrastructure or basic log management (for unstructured text). It lacks features like synthetic monitoring and dedicated security products. While its query engine is powerful, the event-based mindset can have a learning curve if your team is accustomed to metric-centric tools.
The verdict
Honeycomb is an excellent New Relic alternative for developer-centric teams managing complex, distributed microservices who prioritize fast, investigative debugging of production issues. If your team is embracing observability-driven development and needs to quickly find "unknown unknowns" using rich, high-cardinality data, Honeycomb is likely your best bet. It's not for you if you need a single tool for everything from network monitoring to SIEM.
7. Grafana Labs (Cloud & OSS Stack)
Overview
Grafana isn't a single product but an ecosystem built around open-source projects. The "LGTM" stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, Mimir for metrics) provides a comprehensive, composable observability platform. It's available as self-hosted open-source software or as a fully managed SaaS offering via Grafana Cloud.
What's good
- Unmatched Visualization and Dashboarding: Grafana is the de-facto standard for data visualization. Its dashboards are incredibly powerful, flexible, and visually appealing, allowing you to combine data from hundreds of sources into a single pane of glass.
- Open & Composable Architecture: Grafana's strength lies in its open nature. It doesn't lock you into a single data ecosystem, thriving on its extensive data source plugins. This gives you the freedom to choose the best data backend for each need.
- OpenTelemetry and Prometheus Native: The entire Grafana stack is built around OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, making it a natural fit for cloud-native environments.
- Vibrant Open-Source Community: Grafana benefits from a massive, active community contributing plugins, dashboards, and support, driving rapid innovation.
The catch
While powerful, Grafana's flexibility can lead to complexity. Self-hosting the full LGTM stack incurs significant operational overhead, requiring deep in-house expertise for deployment, scaling, and maintenance. Loki, for example, is known to have performance issues with high cardinality. The alerting system, particularly since Grafana 9, is widely criticized as overly complex, unintuitive, and a source of frustration for users. Grafana Cloud's pricing, while often cheaper than Datadog, can still be unpredictable and lead to bill shock if not carefully monitored.
The verdict
Grafana (Cloud or OSS) is a strong New Relic alternative for engineering teams deeply invested in Prometheus and OpenTelemetry, who prioritize ultimate flexibility, data ownership, and best-in-class visualization. If you have the engineering talent to manage a composable open-source stack, or you need a managed service that retains those open principles, Grafana is a great fit. However, if you want a simple, "it just works" solution with intuitive alerting and minimal operational burden, you might struggle.
8. SigNoz
SigNoz positions itself as a direct, open-source, OpenTelemetry-native alternative to all-in-one platforms like Datadog and New Relic. It unifies logs, metrics, and traces in a single application, using ClickHouse as its high-performance backend for efficient data handling.
What's good
- Open-Source & OpenTelemetry-Native: This is SigNoz's core strength. It's built from the ground up to use OpenTelemetry for data collection, avoiding proprietary agents and vendor lock-in, which directly addresses a major pain point of New Relic.
- All-in-One Experience (Logs, Metrics, Traces): SigNoz offers a unified view of all three observability pillars within a single UI, similar to commercial tools but with an open-source core.
- ClickHouse-Powered Performance: Using ClickHouse as its datastore provides high-speed query performance on large datasets, leading to efficient analytics and potentially lower infrastructure costs for self-hosted deployments.
- Simple, Transparent Pricing: For its cloud offering, SigNoz uses a straightforward usage-based model with no per-user or per-host fees, which is a direct competitive response to the complex pricing of incumbents.
The catch
As a relatively newer player in the market, SigNoz has a less mature feature set and fewer pre-built integrations compared to the established giants. While it covers the core observability pillars, it may lack some of the advanced or niche features found in larger, more mature platforms. Its community and support ecosystem are still growing compared to older open-source projects or commercial leaders.
The verdict
SigNoz is a compelling New Relic alternative for startups and cost-conscious engineering teams building on modern, cloud-native stacks that are committed to OpenTelemetry. If you want the convenience of an all-in-one tool but with the benefits of open standards, predictable pricing, and the option to self-host for maximum control, SigNoz is definitely worth evaluating. It offers a clear path away from vendor lock-in and high costs.
Final thoughts
Choosing an observability platform is a strategic decision, not just a technical one. You need a tool that aligns with your team's culture, technical stack, and budget. While established players like New Relic offer broad features, their pricing models and proprietary approaches often create more pain than they solve.
The market is shifting. OpenTelemetry-native solutions like Dash0 are leading the charge, offering transparency, cost control, and true vendor independence. Don't let your observability budget spiral out of control or get locked into a system that works against you. It's time to demand more from your tools.
Ready to take control of your observability? See how Dash0 can transform your monitoring experience with OpenTelemetry-native architecture, transparent pricing, and features designed for real engineers.
Try Dash0 for free today and experience observability without compromise.
